tags

Microsoft spends billions of dollars each year on research and development, but it got its new iPhone application for the price of a couple weeks of Starbucks coffee.

Microsoft just released its second iPhone application, Tag, and it looks like a winner. Tag lets you create your own bar code and then allows other users to "scan" it with their iPhones, accessing whatever information you may want them to see: your contact information, advertisements, and more. I'm thinking of putting one on my business cards.

Tag didn't start out as an iPhone application, however. You can … Read more

Late last year Microsoft surprised us with the release of their first iPhone app, Seadragon. The company has now released its second iPhone app, TagReader (iTunes link).

Launch the app and point your iPhone's camera at a Microsoft Tag. The tag then instantly returns information that connects you to more information without typing long URLs. Interesting, but not exactly a new idea. It reminds me of the Radio Shack CueCat - a cute little plastic kitty cat that basically read barcodes and brought up information based on the code scanned. It was the first digital convergence device that I … Read more

According to Microsoft, Tags create unlimited possibilities for making interactive communications an instant, entertaining part of life. They transform physical media (print advertising, billboards, product packages, information signs, in-store merchandising, or even video images)--into live links for accessing information and entertainment online.

This is all possible after installing some software and using your smartphone's camera, which in turn allows you to interact with these 2-D multicolored triangles in forming a square-like bar code (HCCB format). But unlike traditional tag readers, MS tags don't store the information, but a unique ID that it sends to Microsoft's servers. … Read more

JVC rings in the New Year with not one, not two, but seven new CD receivers for its 2009 mobile entertainment product line.

JVC Mobile's new flagship KD-R900 In-Dash CD Receiver has two USB 2.0 ports (one front and one rear) for connection to an iPod, an iPhone, USB flash memory drives, digital audio players, portable HDD devices, or any two devices simultaneously. The KD-R900 also features hands-free Bluetooth phone calling and A2DP wireless audio streaming capability via an included USB Bluetooth adapter and high-quality external wired microphone. This adapter operates as a fully functional receiver, transmitter, and … Read more

The VM9423 touch-screen multimedia system is the first of six new Jensen models that will launch during the first half of 2009. This top-of-the-line system has a built-in HD Radio tuner, integrated iPod connectivity, and iTunes tagging. The VM9423 is GPS navigation, backup camera, Bluetooth, and Sirius/XM satellite radio ready--all of which require additional modules to add their respective functions. We cringe thinking about the mess of cables and modules that would have to be tucked behind the dash for the full-blown, all-bells-and-whistles install, but we think this modular approach will let users add the features they can afford … Read more

According to a recent New York Times article, 80 percent of people who make New Year's resolutions abandon them before Valentine's Day. But we can all beat the odds, right?

This year, I'm hoping to make some sense of my digital music collection. I'm a big fan of the audio-tracking site Last.fm (my username is "field_day" if you want to friend me), but I'll often get an error when trying to "scrobble" a song because my ID3 information is missing or erroneous.

ID3 is a metadata format within MP3 files … Read more

With its launch of iPhoto 09, Apple has begun showing some reasons why it's worth enduring the hassle of geotagging your photos.

It's generally not easy right now to label your photos with information about where you took the pictures--the process usually is done with special software to marry the photos with location data taken from a separate GPS receiver.

Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, demonstrated what you can do with iPhoto at the Macworld 2009 keynote Tuesday.

iPhoto 09 works best with photos that already have been tagged. That's getting more common, as GPS hardware support becomes less of a rarity. For example, Nikon's Coolpix P6000 has a built-in GPS receiver, and Nikon has begun selling its GP-1 GPS receiver, which can plug into its SLR's flash mount so location data is embedded in the photo. Apple's iPhone can geotag its own photos, and camera manufacturers say GPS support in cameras has become a matter of when, not if.

But the software also can help you tag your own images. Clicking a photo flips it over, letting you type in a location, then showing the spot using a map. (Google supplies back-end mapping services). Helpfully, iPhoto then can spread that location data to other photos with similar time stamps, and they can be bundled together into a group called an event.

OK, but what can you do? Once you have geotagged photos, what can you do with them?

For one thing, sift through them geographically using iPhotos' new Places interface. Viewing an iPhoto event can show an associated collection of pushpins on a map, and clicking each pin shows the photo.

For another, you can search for photos based on where you took them, not on whatever filing system you might use. iPhoto can handle geographic hierarchies, so if you labeled a photo with "Eiffel Tower," it'll find it with a search for "France" or "Paris." … Read more

ZigTag, a social bookmarking tool that has been in the works for years, has finally launched to the public. Competing with services like Delicious and Ma.gnolia, ZigTag categorizes bookmarks through the use of tags and allows users to share those bookmarks with friends. To set itself apart, ZigTag claims its service is "intelligent" and uses semantic technology to understand the meaning of tags. In essence, ZigTag tags have stated definitions, which the company uses to categorize bookmarks more effectively. ZigTag is available upon registration.

Times Square NYC announced its New Year's Eve footage schedule Monday for … Read more

Search Cloudlet is a Firefox extension from the International Software and Productivity Engineering Institute (INTSPEI) that gives users a cloud of tags to help modify and focus searches on Google and Yahoo. Once installed it will show up on top of search results and provides a simple way to tweak the original query by offering up keywords pulled from the results.

Words that appear more often in the results appear as bigger, bolder tags that you can click on to re-start the query with that word tacked on. The creators recommend dialing up the number of default search results to … Read more